Roofing SEO Marketing: The Simple Guide to Getting Leads from Google

Roofing SEO Marketing: The Simple Guide to Getting Leads from Google

Are you willing to implement simple techniques to attract people searching for residential or commercial roofing contractors online and are ready to pay for your services?

Imagine how much money you’ll make if you get these customers to come to you without you having to pay tens of thousands of dollars on TV, Radio, or Newspaper advertising.

Certainly, your revenue will dramatically increase!

To reach these customers, pay more attention to search engines. Or what is popularly referred to as “Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

With SEO, 93% of people who want a new roofing project or roofing company can easily find your website, call your phone number, or visit your office.

Before I show you the secret, a few facts would inspire you.

The housing market has experienced a dramatic growth rate of 11.4% since 2008. Home pricing grew from $180,000 in the Q4 2008 to $200,700 in August 2017.

The interesting part is that most people are finding their dream homes on the internet. That’s where you come in. You need to position your website so that these home buyers can easily find your website.

And guess where home buyers and home sellers will look when they need a roofing company to upgrade the homes?

The internet.

They will find the best roofing company near them using the Google search engine or ask friends and family members to recommend the right contractors.

The demand for residential roofing products has grown exponentially in the past years due to new houses being built and new home sales reaching 629,000 in Signed Contracts.

There’s a big opportunity to get roofing jobs. When you add repair jobs, there’s an even bigger pool.

Yes, they should. When people are looking for real estate agents, real estate companies, or a roofing expert, in particular, they visit online marketing channels such as search engines (e.g., Google) and local directories like Yelp.

People use search engines when they want to buy a product or pay for a service. I’m sure you have bought an item online recently or in the past.

You might even be planning to buy the latest gadget on Amazon. In the same vein, when people are looking for a residential or commercial roofing contractor or search for a roofer in your city or state, showing up at the top of the search results will bring in more leads you can turn to customers.

Having said that, getting your roofing business website to rank high on Google requires more than just creating a website and hoping for the best.

You need to have a strategy. This will include steps you need to take to optimize your roofing website for both users and search engine crawlers.

If you’ve never done this before, this article will guide you accordingly.

I’ll show you simple ways give your roofing business the right exposure to potential customers in the search engines. Especially customers who search with any of these keywords:

Best roofing company + your state (e.g., best roofing company California)

Best roofing expert + your city (e.g., best roofing expert San Francisco)

And so on.

You also want your roofing website to appear in Google top 10 results when customers search with any of these keywords:

Roofing company near me

Roofing expert near + your state (e.g., roofing expert near Chicago)

Roofing company near + your city (e.g., roofing company near Boston)

The list goes on and on.

That said, here are the specific steps you’re expected to take to rank in Google’s first page for any of the keywords variations above?

1. Blogging

You already know it’s vital to have a website for your business. On your website, you can have dedicated pages for About Us, Contact, Services, Projects, and other pages that give visitors your business information.

But make no mistakes about it. It’s difficult to bring visitors to a website that offers no value. That’s why a blog is more powerful and relevant for this purpose.

The major way of increasing organic traffic or any type of traffic at all is to have a blog. Added to that, you need to update it regularly with helpful articles, videos, podcasts, whitepaper reports, etc.

According to HubSpot, B2C companies that blogged 11+ times per month got more than 4 times as many leads than those that blog only 4 to 5 times per month.

You don’t have to post new content on your blog every single day. But you have to maintain a regular schedule.

For some, a 3-post in a week is okay while some prefer 2 posts per week. Some have found a convenient schedule that works for them. Brian Dean posts a few times in a month.

For your roofing business, having weekly posts is a good frequency to keep up with.

However, writing content isn’t the most important step in gaining organic traffic.

Producing useful content that you promote is the key to winning search engine rankings. Your content has to be ‘Effective’ if you want to rank in Google top 10.

What is Effective Content?

Effective content is a piece of content that meets your website visitors’ needs. Your ideal customer might be searching for information online that will help them to learn a new thing about roofing or solve an urgent roofing problem in their homes.

In a nutshell, an effective content is targeted to meet a ‘specific need’ of your customers.

In the light of solving specific problems that home buyers, home sellers, and those looking for a better roofing facility have, here are proven ways of creating effective articles for your roofing website?

i). Write long-form content: Content can be in different formats such as blog posts, video, slide presentations, infographics, and more. Since your roofing blog will be mostly blog posts, you have a responsibility to make it the best.

The truth is that short posts (300 – 800 words) are easier to write but they rarely rank high in search engines.

In fact, research compiled by QuickSprout showed that a post in the number #1 position on Google has an average of 2,450 words and an average post in the top 10 positions has over 2,000 words. In the words of Neil Patel:

Bear in mind that 2,000-word isn’t the magic number of words to have for your post.

These are only average numbers which means some industries such as real estate and roofing require longer articles compared to movies and film making, for example.

So does Google care about the length of your content?

Sure it does. Google stated that a piece of content is long enough when it has explained its topic to solve users’ problems.

What this means is that explaining a wide topic would require many words than a narrow topic. You’ll probably require a fewer number of words to explain “shingle replacement” than “a guide to roofing a house.”

One other element to add to your content is images. People find it easier to learn with visual content and it aids in explaining a concept better.

For example, Bens Roofing, a popular roofing contractor uses high-quality and relevant image(s) on their post — thus making it easier to read.

ii). Carry out keywords research: This activity helps you to know which terms your potential customers are searching for. When you’re armed with such data, you could optimize your content (i.e., blog posts) to target these keywords.

There’s a better explanation of keyword research later in this guide. So keep reading…

iii). Repurpose your content into various forms: To give your content a wider reach, it’s important to repurpose your content in other forms apart from the written text.

In some cases, explaining a roofing concept with a video would provide a better solution to your audience.

So if your blog post has been ‘truly’ useful and interesting, you can take the persuasive sections and create a video or slide presentation. You could also take the actionable points and create an infographic which you can share with other roofing companies and real estate agents.

They’ll cite and link to your roofing website as the source. These would serve as votes to boost your search rankings, lead generation, and revenue.

Content repurposing has been used by RedBull, Disney, Marvel, Marketo, and thousands of other businesses.

As an example, Marketo created Definitive Guides that run into 100 pages long. And because these guides are too big to consume at a go, Marketo decided to break it into easy-to-consume pieces, thereby creating infographics, webinars, videos, cheat sheets, etc.

As a result, one of their repurposed content has generated an additional 102,000 views — despite being a gated content.

Note: Gated content is that content whereby the owner requires the customer to fill a form first before they can access, download, or read the content.

As a roofing contractor, here’s an idea on how to repurpose your content.

You can take your best posts and produce a weekly or monthly podcast series targeted at homeowners with roofing questions or general roof repairs.

Better yet, you could interview a real estate agent or broker each week about the factors they consider when roofing a house or what they look for in a roofing contractor.

Then, you could take the transcript and create a useful blog post, create an infographic, or share a slide presentation on Slideshare.net.

This approach will send you more targeted traffic to your website and leads to your business. Don’t take it lightly.

2. Target the right keywords in your website pages

To take your roofing blog to another level of success, there’s a need to conduct keywords research to uncover the exact keywords that homeowners, home sellers, and other people who want a residential or commercial roofing job done are searching for.

Also, knowing the trends and how many searches it receives in a month is important.

This is one of the most important activities you can carry out to get more leads from search engines.

Why? Because if you do everything well but target the wrong keywords, then you’ll get leads that are less likely to pay for your service. This will defeat the purpose of what you’re trying to achieve in the first place.

Keywords research involves looking for the search terms that your ideal customers are likely to enter or input in a search engine box.

To carry out effective research, you need to define your ideal customer. This means you need to create a buyer persona. That’s usually the first step.

i). Creating a buyer persona

A buyer persona is a document where you list the details of your ideal customer. It helps to give focus to your overall marketing as you can create your messages specifically to influence this person who’s, of course, interested in hiring a roofing contractor.

Here’s a buyer persona example of a “Stay at Home Mom” to give you an idea:

A buyer persona should include as many details as possible about your ideal customer. Some of these details are:

Name

Age

Income

Family status

Job

Number of children

Working hours

Likes

Dislikes

You can add more details to those listed above. Adding as many details as possible makes your buyer persona real and human. You can have a few detailed buyer personas for your business if you have more than a single ideal customer. This would depend on how extensive your roofing service is.

After defining your buyer persona, you need to write out some head keywords. These are keywords that contain a few words. For example:

Roofing contractors

Best roofing company

Top roofing experts

Note: If you’re new to online marketing and SEO, then targeting head keywords will likely not get you results because they’re not defined. And they’re competitive.

That means a lot of roofing companies are targeting the same head keywords. Besides, when a homeowner, for example, searches for top roofing experts, does it mean they’re ready to hire a company yet? Well, it’s not defined.

The best approach is to target long-tail keywords. These keywords are well-defined because you know exactly what the customer wants. And it’s a lot easier to rank in Google top 10 for them because not too many of your competitors (i.e., roofing companies) are optimizing their website pages for them.

Examples of long-tail keywords:

Best roofing contractors in Orleans

Top commercial roofing companies near me

Cost of roofing a bungalow house

Moving on, for your keywords, you need them to have 2 traits:

a). Location-based keywords: In most cases, your ideal client is in the same city or town you have your business. Therefore, it’s important to target users in this locality. Your local keywords will usually include your location and roofing keyword.

If you do it right, you can increase traffic to your website by 320%. [source]

Examples of local-based keywords are:

[city] roofers

[city] roofing contractors

[city] best residential roofers

Best commercial roofing company in [city]

Best roofers near me

These are examples of local keywords that potential customers might search for.

b). Long-tail keywords: Broad term keywords usually bring in more traffic to your website. But it’s much more difficult to rank for these keywords.

For instance, a term like “New York roofers” is difficult to rank for due to the high competition. It’s also difficult to determine the user intent behind such keywords.

However, a keyword like “emergency roof repair New York” will have a lower search volume and a weaker competition too. This means it’s easier to rank for these terms and the user intent is clearer. According to Moz, long-tail keywords represent 70% of search traffic.

That said, it’s impossible to do keywords research for your roofing company properly without the right tools.

These keywords research tools help you to see the search volume and the competition for that keyword. You can also get long-tail variations of head terms.

Some keywords research tools you can use to find the right roofing keywords are SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz, Ubersuggest, KeywordTool.io, CognitiveSEO, etc. I’ll talk about 2 of them in this guide and how to use them.

KeywordTool.io pulls keywords from Google autocomplete to give you a larger list of keyword suggestions than what you see on Google. On this list, you can find long-tail variations of your keyword. This is important as these are terms that users are actually searching.

Enter your main keyword (e.g., roofing company in New York) into the search bar and click on “Search.”

You’ll see a list of keywords suggestions. However, you’ll need to subscribe to a paid version of the tool to unlock more keyword suggestions and details like search volume and Cost Per Click (CPC).

Another tool you can use for your keywords research is UberSuggest. This tool will show you the search volume for a keyword, SEO difficulty, Paid Difficulty, and CPC.

Apart from that, you can also find keyword ideas similar to the search term you’re researching.

To use the tool, visit the website and enter your keyword. You can also select your country to make the metrics more accurate.

Click on “Search” to begin the search.

To see more keyword suggestions, click on “Keyword ideas.”

On this page, you can also see the web pages currently ranking for the keywords. If you want to keep a copy of the data, you can download as a CSV file or copy to clipboard.

You can also apply a filter to your keyword ideas.

With proper keywords research, you can target the right keywords that your potential customers are using to look for commercial or residential roofing online.

3. Create and claim a Google My Business page

Google is by far the largest search engine. A large share of people searching are performing local searches — like searching for a roofing company in their locality. Research by Google shows that 4 in 5 consumers conduct local searches on search engines.

For many local searches, Google presents its local map pack which shows 3 businesses relevant to the search term in the locality.

To show up among the 3-pack, you’d have optimized your website and online presence for local searches. One way to do that is to have a well-optimized Google My Business page.

If you don’t have a Google My Business page for your business, you need to create one.

You’ll fill in your business name and other basic details like address and phone number.

You’ll also select a category for your business.

After filling out the necessary details about your business, you’ll need to verify it after your registration.

Google could send a pin to your business location or you can select other forms of verification. You should note that you’ll only have a full access to your Google My Business page after verification.

Now that you have this page, what are the steps you need to take to improve the chances of your page showing up for search terms?

i). Add more business details: You can add more details like Opening hours, Images of your business location, etc. This page should serve as an online business card. Any visitor to this page should have all the necessary information they need to contact you for roofing services.

ii). Add posts: Google allows you to add short posts to your page. Although the post usually lasts for a week, you can add posts weekly to keep your page updated.

There are templates you can use to announce an event or promotional offers.

iii). Encourage reviews: When you have a happy customer after doing a roofing job in their home, kindly ask them to rate your business and write a review on the page. I’ll talk more about reviews later in this guide.

4. Add your roofing business to local listing directories

To check the authenticity of a local business, search engines will regularly check for the business’ details on local listing directories. The higher the number of local listings directories your business appears, the better.

BrightLocal conducted a research and discovered that a business that ranks in the top 3 positions of Google local search has an average of 85 local citations.

Having your business on local listing directories shows your business is authentic and can appear as a relevant local business.

There are so many local directories out there. Some of them are general listings for every type of business in any location e. g. Yelp.

You also have local directories that are related to particular businesses or a city. Some of the local listings your business should appear on are:

Yelp

Foursquare

Yahoo! Local

Bing Places

CitySearch

Craigslist

Localeze

Local.com

Yellow Pages

Super pages

MerchantCircle

Note: To give your listings the best effects possible, use a consistent business name, address, and phone number (NAP).

Before you begin adding your business to local business directories, write down the business name, address, and phone number you’ll use for every listing.

An inconsistent NAP can cause confusion for search engines. This would see your ranking drop rather than a rise in the organic results.

You can use a tool like Moz Local to check how consistent your listings are across various directories.

Encourage Reviews

No matter how good you are as a roofer, people will be skeptical of employing your services if you’ve never worked for other businesses.

The truth is that you may have worked for hundreds of people but if you have no ratings and reviews online, there’s no way a prospect can know.

Reviews, however, have a big impact on a prospect’s decision to check your business out. BrightLocal found that 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

In most cases, satisfied customers don’t post reviews on your Google My Business page or other listings. You have to encourage them to do so. If you ask, many of them will post a review and rate your business.

For instance, 68% of consumers write an honest local business review when they were asked. You can always tell your customers to post a review after you’ve completed a roofing job or a minor roof repair.

5. Build Backlinks

For your roofing business website to rank well in Google search engine, there are 2 important things you must do:

On the other hand, Off-Page optimization is another important aspect of increasing your website traffic and driving customers to your business. In general, off-page optimization boils down to getting backlinks.

Backlinks may be one of the most difficult off-page SEO tactics. However, it’s the most important. According to Google’s search analyst, Andrey Lipattsev, the 3 most important ranking signals are quality of content, backlinks, and Rankbrain.

Links are so important to Google for making decisions regarding the placement of websites in the organic results. [source]

Brian Dean conducted a research and found a correlation between the number of referring domains to a page and its Google search ranking with about 300 referring domains to the number one result.

An important detail to keep at the back of your mind is that backlinks carry different effects. In fact, some backlinks are harmful to your website and could see your rankings drop rather than improve.

Having said that, a backlink from an authoritative website could make your roofing web page rank in a few weeks for a less-competitive and commercial keyword (e.g., best roofing contractor near me).

These backlinks would even have a bigger effect if the authoritative websites linking to your website are related to the roofing industry.

For instance, a backlink from an authority roofing website or a real estate website would have a big weight towards your rankings — since they’re more relevant than a health website. Here’s a link from a real estate company pointing to a real estate investing blog. Ain’t they relevant?

In the same way, backlinks from websites in your locality authenticate your business as a local business. This will give you a better ranking power for local searches.

When you’re ready to get high-quality backlinks, there are effective techniques you should use such as:

i). Guest posting

When you write an article to address an aspect of residential or commercial roofing that gets published on another website, you have access to their audience, customers, and trust.

This is an opportunity to establish your reputation as a roofing expert. It’s also an opportunity to gain a trusted backlink from the website.

Eastwood Roofing, a company that provides professional roofing services to clients in the Essex and its environs implemented online marketing to attract new customers looking for roof repairs and related services.

With content marketing, blogging, guest blogging, search engine optimization, and other proven strategies, in just 1 month of putting in the work, Eastwood Roofing generated an additional 680 website visits and lots of links, got 78 phone calls, received 5 emails and increased revenue by £10,300 — that’s a 400% ROI growth from an initial investment of £2,100.

ii). Posting on forums

There are forums where people post questions about different issues they have. Answering questions on this forums help to solve someone’s problem and also establish your reputation.

In some cases, if you have a post that answers their question in details, you can link to it.

It’s important that you maintain a healthy ratio between the number of referring domains and backlinks.

Having 3 million links from 20 domains will get you a Google penalty rather than a higher search ranking.

6. Implement Schema Markup

Even though search engines are very intelligent, it’s still difficult to get some details about a page. Schema Markup tells search engines important details about your business.

For instance, having your business address and phone number below your search engine result can increase the click-through rate to your page. Here’s an example:

Bear in mind that potential leads can contact you while they’re still on the search engine results page (SERP). There are many ways to implement schema markup. A website developer can implement the code on your website if you want.

Another way is to use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper. The first step is to select the category your page belongs to. Then insert the website address you want to markup.

The markup helper will open your web page and you can markup details on the page.

After this, click on the “Create HTML” button. You can then copy the HTML code with markup and replace it with your page source code. If you don’t know how to go about it, you can get a website developer to do it for you.

7. Optimize your website for mobile devices

If you want more leads to your roofing business from search engines, then it’s vital you optimize your website for mobile devices. Because about 60% of Google searches are done on mobile.

This means the mobile version of your website will be indexed first before the desktop version. Having a poor mobile website could see your website rankings drop.

Having a mobile-responsive website means your website would adjust to any screen size your visitor is using. If you have a responsive website, then your website is good and homeowners and sellers looking for roofing services will love it.

If there are other issues with your website, you’ll see them when you click on “View Details.”

Most people carry out their online research using a smartphone when looking for a roofing contractor near them. It’s necessary to have a website that’s accessible to Smartphone users and Tablet users — else, they leave or bounce from your website.

iii). Compress images and videos: Large images and videos contribute to a heavy page size. Reducing the size of your images and videos will reduce the page size and thus increase speed. You can use Movavi Video Compressor tool.

iv). Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN hosts your images and videos instead of having them on your website. This will reduce your page size and increase speed.

Conclusion

The roofing market and real estate industry, in general, is competitive. You’ll be competing with other businesses if you ignore online marketing.

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